Charlie, the stakes do indeed keep getting higher. But that's just one influence. Another counterinfluence is, "as the consumer goes, so does the enterprise," which I wrote about on my blog when I first started thinking about this. (http://feldman.org/blog/rise-personal-cloud/)

Many people SAY that it doesn't matter what the price point is, the enterprise must spend what it takes to protect data or compute. But the reality is that enterprises are just as sensitive to price points as anyone else. Remember the enterprise-targeted 802.11a? Essentially no adoption. Why? In my view, crushed by the low price point of 802.11b (consumer) chips. My point: no matter what the stakes are, if "personal cloud" becomes pervasive in the consumer space, we'd better expect it to trickle in to the enterprise. And we're going to need that credibility that Rob talked about as well as the business partner and coworker cooperation that you describe.

Yeah, IT needs to keep a cooperative and credible attitude toward user activity. But the stakes keep getting higher. With bring your own storage, key company data can migrate outside the company's walls and be stored, or shared, in all the wrong ways. With great access to data comes increased responsibility. Most employees are equal to the charge. But then, there's always a few rogue cases where you don't know what will happen.

Rob – you hit it on the head. If IT is seen as credible, seen as engaging and willing to provide the tools, social and collaborative, that truly enhance productivity, then people will have less need to "do it on their own." But with the power of BYOD (device), BYOA (Applications) and BYOS (storage) and more, users must heed the words of Ben Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility." Users need to exercise their personal responsibility (even if they can't walk on walks and shoot webs).

The key sentence here is this one: "The best shield against any rogue IT activities in the enterprise will continue to be the IT organization's credibility." IT organizations need to join the personal cloud conversation, just as they have the BYOD conversation.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.